Story Time: The Tale of How We Got Our First GPS

Since Erin and I are your typical broke college students, finding money to buy a GPS was going to be hard for us when we first began this journey. Plus we were anxious to get out in the field to begin collecting caches that we did not want to wait for any kind of money to come our way. So we decided to go about caching in a very primitive way: Google Maps. It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. We figured we had no money, so why not try and “beat” the system. Looking back on that idea now I would have told myself that I was crazy for thinking a blurry icon on a map would show me where a cache was. However, we gave it a go and actually came up with 7finds on our first day of caching GPS-less. It was sort of a triumphant day for us that I think we will always look back on a laugh. So here I was all excited to log these finds and in doing so I wanted to make it clear that we made these finds by using Google Maps and not a GPS. I thought it would make us look hardcore or something. Interestingly enough, a fellow cacher in the area was reading our logs and decided to shoot me an e-mail. He mentioned that he saw we used Google Maps to find our caches and wondered if we planned on getting a GPS. Naturally, I responded and told him that a GPS was in our future plans since it was something we really could not afford at the moment. Later that day I got his response telling me that he had an extra GPS and was willing to give it to us for no charge. Now, I may be a college student, but I know that in today’s day and age it is rare to receive anything for free. Sure enough though we met him for lunch a few days later and he gave us our GPS that we still use today. It really was a blessing that he found our logs and was gracious enough to do that for us. Not only that, he also became a good caching friend. In fact, we have been on a few cache hunts with him and hopefully more in our future. If he ever does read this, Thank You from the bottom of our hearts!